Performing context-rich attribute-based load balancing on a host

ABSTRACT

Some embodiments of the invention provide a novel architecture for capturing contextual attributes on host computers that execute one or more machines and for consuming the captured contextual attributes to perform services on the host computers. The machines are virtual machines (VMs) in some embodiments, containers in other embodiments, or a mix of both VMs and containers in still other embodiments. Some embodiments execute a guest-introspection (GI) agent on each machine from which contextual attributes need to be captured. In addition to executing one or more machines on each host computer, these embodiments also execute a context engine and one or more attribute-based service engines on each host computer. One of these service engines is a load balancer. Through the GI agents of the machines on a host, the context engine of that host in some embodiments collects contextual attributes associated with network events and/or process events on the machines. The context engine then provides the contextual attributes to the load balancer, which, in turn, uses these contextual attributes to identify load-balancing rules that specify how the data messages should be distributed in a load-balanced manner.

BACKGROUND

Middlebox services have historically been hardware appliances that are implemented at one or more points in a network topology in an enterprise or a datacenter. With the advent of software defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization, traditional hardware appliances do not take advantage of the flexibility and control that is provided by SDN and network virtualization. Accordingly, in recent years, some have suggested various ways to provide middlebox services on hosts. Most of these middlebox solutions, however, do not take advantage of the rich-contextual data that can be captured for each data message flow on the host. One reason for this is that existing techniques do not provide an efficient, distributed scheme for filtering the thousands of captured-contextual attributes in order to efficiently process service rules that are defined in terms of much smaller sets of contextual attributes.

BRIEF SUMMARY

Some embodiments of the invention provide a novel architecture for capturing contextual attributes on host computers that execute one or more machines, and for consuming the captured contextual attributes to perform services on the host computers. The machines are virtual machines (VMs) in some embodiments, containers in other embodiments, or a mix of both VMs and containers in still other embodiments.

Some embodiments execute a guest-introspection (GI) agent on each machine from which contextual attributes need to be captured. In addition to executing one or more machines on each host computer, these embodiments also execute a context engine and one or more attribute-based service engines on each host computer. Through the GI agents of the machines on a host, the context engine of that host in some embodiments collects contextual attributes associated with network events and/or process events on the machines. As further described below, the context engine then provides the contextual attributes to the service engines, which, in turn, use these contextual attributes to identify service rules that specify context-based services to perform on processes executing on the machines and/or data message flows sent by or received for the machines.

In some embodiments, the context engine of a host collects contextual attributes from the GI agents of the machines on that host through a variety of different ways. For instance, in some embodiments, the GI agent on a machine registers hooks (e.g., callbacks) with one or more modules (e.g., kernel-space modules or user-space modules) in the machine's operating system for all new network connection events and all new process events.

Upon the occurrence of a new network connection event, the GI agent receives a callback from the OS and based on this callback, provides a network event identifier to the context engine. The network event identifier provides a set of attributes pertaining to the network event. These network event attributes in some embodiments include a five-tuple identifier (i.e., source port and IP address, destination port and IP address, and protocol) of the requested network connection, process identifier of the process requesting the network connection, a user identifier associated with the requesting process, and a group identifier (e.g., an activity directory (AD) identifier) associated with the requesting process.

In some embodiments, the context engine directs the GI agent to collect from the OS modules additional process parameters that are associated with the process identifier (ID) that it received with the network event. These additional process parameters in some embodiments include the process name, the process hash, the process path with command line parameters, the process network connection, the process-loaded modules, and one or more process consumption parameters specifying the process' consumption of one or more resources of the machine (e.g., central processing unit consumption, network consumption, and memory consumption). Instead of using the process identifier to query the GI agent for additional process parameters associated with a network event, the context engine in other embodiments receives all the process parameters associated with a network event in one shot when the GI agent reports the network event to the context engine.

The OS on a machine in some embodiments holds up a new network event (i.e., does not start sending data messages for the network event) until the GI agent on the machine directs it to proceed with processing the network event. In some of these embodiments, the GI agent only allows the OS to proceed with processing the network event after the context engine has collected all of the needed attributes for this event (e.g., after receiving a message from the context engine that specifies that it has received all of the process or network attributes that it needs for the new network event).

In some embodiments, the context engine uses the process hash that it receives from the GI agent to identify the name and version of the application (i.e., the software product) to which the process belongs. To do this, the context engine in some embodiments stores process hashes and associated application names/versions, compares the process hash that it receives from the GI agent with the stored process hashes to identify a matching hash, and then uses the application name/version of the matching hash as the application name and version of the process associated with the event.

In some embodiments, the context engine obtains the process hashes and application names/versions from one or more network or compute managers, which may operate on another device or computer. In other embodiments, the context engine provides the hash associated with a process identifier to a network or compute manager, which then matches this hash to its process hash records and provides the application name/version of the associated process to the context engine. Once the context engine obtains the application name/version associated with a network event, it can provide the name and version attributes to the attribute-based service engines, which can use this information (i.e., the application name and/or version) to identify the service rule to enforce.

Upon the occurrence of a process event, the GI agent receives a callback from the OS and based on this callback, provides a process event identifier to the context engine. The process event identifier provides a set of attributes pertaining to the process event. This set of attributes includes the process identifier in some embodiments. In some embodiments, this set also includes a user identifier and a group identifier (e.g., an activity directory (AD) identifier).

In some embodiments, the GI agent provides all the process parameters (e.g., process identifier, user ID, group ID, process name, process hash, loaded module identifiers, consumption parameters, etc.) associated with a process event to the context engine when it reports the process event to the context engine. In other embodiments, the context engine directs the GI agent to collect from the OS modules additional process parameters that are associated with the process identifier that the context engine received with the process event. These additional process parameters in some embodiments are the same (e.g., process name, process hash, loaded module identifiers, consumption parameters, etc.) as the process parameters mentioned above for reported network events.

The context engine of some embodiments augments the contextual attributes that it receives from the GI agent with contextual attributes that it receives from other modules that execute on the host. For instance, in some embodiments, a deep packet inspection (DPI) module executes on the host. The context engine or another module (e.g., a firewall engine) directs this DPI engine to examine data messages of a data message flow associated with a process ID to identify the type of traffic being sent in these data messages by the application associated with the process ID.

The identified traffic-type identity is commonly referred to today as the AppID. Also, currently there are a number of DPI modules that analyze messages of a data message flow in order to generate the AppID. In some embodiments, the context engine combines the AppID that it obtains for a network event with other context attributes that it identifies for this event (e.g., by using the event's five-tuple identifier to associate the AppID with the collected contextual attributes) in order to produce a rich set of attributes that the service engines can then use to perform their services. This rich set of attributes provides true application identity (i.e., the application name, application version, application traffic type, etc.), based on which the service engines can perform their services.

Also, in some embodiments, a threat detection module executes on the host computer along with the context engine. Once the context engine obtains a set of process parameters that specify that a process has started on a machine or that is sending data messages on the machine, the context engine in some embodiments provides one or more process parameters (e.g., process hash, application name, application version, AppID, other process parameters, etc.) to the threat detection module. This threat detection module then generates a threat level indicator (e.g., low, medium, high, etc.) for the identified process and provides this threat level indicator to the context engine. The context engine then provides this threat level indicator to one or more service engines as another contextual attribute for performing services on a new process event or the data messages of a new network event; a service engine can use the threat level indicator as another attribute to identify service rules to enforce.

The context engine employs a push model in some embodiments to distribute the collected contextual attributes to the service engines, employs a pull model in other embodiments to distribute these attribute to the service engines, while in other embodiments, employing a push model for some service engines and a pull model for other service engines. In the push model, the context engine distributes to a service engine the contextual attributes that it collects for a process event or a network event with the process's identifier and/or the network event's flow identifier (e.g., the flow's five-tuple identifier). In some embodiments, the context engine distributes to the service engine only the contextual attributes that are relevant for that service engine's service rules.

In the pull model, the context engine receives queries from a service engine for the contextual attributes that the context engine has collected for a particular process or network connection. In some embodiments, the context engine receives a process ID or a flow identifier (e.g., five-tuple identifier) with a query from the service engine, and uses the received identifier to identify the attribute set that it has to provide to the service engine. In some embodiments, the context engine generates a service token (also called a service tag) for the collection of attributes that are relevant for the service engine, and provides this service token to another module (e.g., the GI agent or another module on the host) to pass along to the service engine (e.g., pass along in a data message's encapsulating tunnel header). The service engine then extracts the service token and provides this service token to the context engine in order to identify the contextual attributes that the context engine will need to provide to the service engine.

The context engine in some embodiments provides contextual attributes to several context-based service engines on its host computer. In some embodiments, the context engine and the service engines are all kernel space components of a hypervisor on which multiple VMs or containers execute. In other embodiments, the context engine and/or one or more service engines are user space processes. For example, one or more service engines in some embodiments are service VMs (SVMs).

Different embodiments use different types of context-based service engines. For instance, in some embodiments, these attribute-based service engines include (1) a firewall engine that performs context-based firewall operations on data messages sent by or received for the machines, (2) a process control engine that enforces context-based process control operations (e.g., process assessment and termination operations) on processes started on the machines, and (3) a load balancing engine that performs context-based load balancing operations to distribute the data message flows from the machines to different destination or service nodes in one or more destination/service node clusters.

Another context-based service engine in some embodiments is a discovery service engine. In some embodiments, the discovery engine captures new process events and new network events from the context engine, along with the contextual attributes that the context engine collects for these process and network events. The discovery service engine then relays these events and their associated contextual attributes to one or more network managers (e.g., servers) that provide a management layer that allows network administrators to visualize events in a datacenter and specify policies for compute and network resources in the datacenter.

In relaying these events and attributes to the network management layer, the discovery module of some embodiments performs some pre-processing of these events and attributes. For example, in some embodiments, the discovery module filters some of the network or process events, while aggregating some or all of these events and their attributes. Also, in some embodiments, the discovery engine directs the context engine to collect additional contextual attributes for process or network events through the GI agents or other modules (e.g., the DPI engine or threat detection engine), or to capture other types of events, such as file events and system events.

For example, in some embodiments, the discovery engine directs the context engine to build an inventory of the applications installed on the machines, and to periodically refresh this inventory. The discovery engine might so direct the context engine at the request of the management plane, or based on operational configurations that the management or control plane specifies for the discovery engine. In response to the request from the discovery engine, the context engine in some embodiments has each GI agent on each of its host's machines discover all installed processes on the machine and all running processes and services.

After building an inventory of installed applications and the running processes/services, the discovery engine of a host computer in a datacenter provides this information to the network/compute managers in the management plane. In some embodiments, the management plane collects contextual attributes from sources other than the host computer discovery and context engines. For instance, in some embodiments, the management plane collects from one or more servers compute context (e.g., cloud context from cloud vendors, or compute virtualization context by datacenter virtualization software), identity context from directory service servers, mobility context from mobility management servers, endpoint context from DNS (domain name servers) and application inventory servers, network context (e.g., virtual network context from network virtualization server), etc.

By collecting the contextual information (e.g., information from the discovery and context engines and/or information from other context sources), the management plane can provide a user interface to the network/compute administrators to visualize the compute and network resources in the datacenter. Moreover, the collected contextual attributes allow the management plane to provide controls through this user interface for these administrators to specify context-based service rules and/or policies. These service rules/policies are then distributed to the host computers so that service engines on these computers can perform context-based service operations.

The preceding Summary is intended to serve as a brief introduction to some embodiments of the invention. It is not meant to be an introduction or overview of all inventive subject matter disclosed in this document. The Detailed Description that follows and the Drawings that are referred to in the Detailed Description will further describe the embodiments described in the Summary as well as other embodiments. Accordingly, to understand all the embodiments described by this document, a full review of the Summary, Detailed Description, the Drawings and the Claims is needed. Moreover, the claimed subject matters are not to be limited by the illustrative details in the Summary, Detailed Description and the Drawing.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The novel features of the invention are set forth in the appended claims. However, for purposes of explanation, several embodiments of the invention are set forth in the following figures.

FIG. 1 illustrates a host computer that uses the context engine and context-based service engines of some embodiments of the invention.

FIG. 2 illustrates a more-detailed example of a host computer that in some embodiments is used to establish a distributed architecture for configuring and performing context-rich, attribute-based services in a datacenter.

FIG. 3 illustrates a process performed by a context engine of some embodiments.

FIG. 4 illustrates examples of load-balancing rules of some embodiments.

FIG. 5 illustrates load balancers of some embodiments that distribute webserver traffic amongst several application servers.

FIG. 6 illustrates a process that the load balancer performs in some embodiments.

FIG. 7 illustrates an example of how the service engines are managed in some embodiments.

FIG. 8 conceptually illustrates a computer system with which some embodiments of the invention are implemented.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

In the following detailed description of the invention, numerous details, examples, and embodiments of the invention are set forth and described. However, it will be clear and apparent to one skilled in the art that the invention is not limited to the embodiments set forth and that the invention may be practiced without some of the specific details and examples discussed.

Some embodiments of the invention provide a novel architecture for capturing contextual attributes on host computers that execute one or more machines and for consuming the captured contextual attributes to perform services on the host computers. Some embodiments execute a guest-introspection (GI) agent on each machine from which contextual attributes need to be captured. In addition to executing one or more machines on each host computer, these embodiments also execute a context engine and one or more attribute-based service engines on each host computer. Through the GI agents of the machines on a host, the context engine of that host in some embodiments collects contextual attributes associated with network events and/or process events on the machines. The context engine then provides the contextual attributes to the service engines, which, in turn, use these contextual attributes to identify service rules that specify context-based services to perform on processes executing on the machines and/or data message flows sent by or received for the machines.

As used in this document, data messages refer to a collection of bits in a particular format sent across a network. One of ordinary skill in the art will recognize that the term data message may be used herein to refer to various formatted collections of bits that may be sent across a network, such as Ethernet frames, IP packets, TCP segments, UDP datagrams, etc. Also, as used in this document, references to L2, L3, L4, and L7 layers (or layer 2, layer 3, layer 4, layer 7) are references respectively to the second data link layer, the third network layer, the fourth transport layer, and the seventh application layer of the OSI (Open System Interconnection) layer model.

FIG. 1 illustrates a host computer 100 that uses the context engine and context-based service engines of some embodiments of the invention. As shown, the host computer 100 includes several data compute nodes (DCN) 105, a context engine 110, several context-based service engines 130, a threat detector 132, and a deep packet inspection (DPI) module 135. The context-based service engines include a discovery engine 120, a process control engine 122, a load balancer 126 and a firewall engine 128. It also includes a context-based service rule storage 140 and context-attribute storage 145.

The DCNs are endpoint machines executing on the host computer 100. The DCNs are virtual machines (VMs) in some embodiments, containers in other embodiments, or a mix of both VMs and containers in still other embodiments. On each DCN, a GI agent 150 executes in order to collect contextual attributes for the context engine 110. In some embodiments, the context engine 110 collects contextual attributes from the GI agents 150 of the DCNs on its host through a variety of different ways. For instance, in some embodiments, the GI agent on a DCN registers hooks (e.g., callbacks) with one or more modules (e.g., kernel-space modules or user-space modules) in the DCN's operating system for all new network connection events and all new process events.

Upon the occurrence of a new network connection event, the GI agent 150 receives a callback from its DCN's OS and based on this callback, provides a network event identifier to the context engine 110. The network event identifier provides a set of attributes pertaining to the network event. These network event attributes in some embodiments include a five-tuple identifier (i.e., source port and IP address, destination port and IP address, and protocol) of the requested network connection, process identifier of the process requesting the network connection, a user identifier associated with the requesting process, and a group identifier (e.g., an activity directory (AD) identifier) associated with the requesting process.

In some embodiments, the context engine directs the GI agent 150 to collect from the OS modules additional process parameters that are associated with the process identifier (ID) that it received with the network event. These additional process parameters in some embodiments include the process name, the process hash, the process path with command line parameters, the process network connection, the process-loaded modules, and one or more process consumption parameters specifying the process' consumption of one or more resources of the machine (e.g., central processing unit consumption, network consumption, and memory consumption). Instead of using the process identifier to query the GI agent 150 for additional process parameters associated with a network event, the context engine 110 in other embodiments receives all of the process parameters associated with a network event simultaneously when the GI agent reports the network event to the context engine.

The OS of the DCN in some embodiments holds up a new network event (i.e., does not start sending data messages for the network event) until the GI agent 150 on that DCN directs it to proceed with processing the network event. In some of these embodiments, the GI agent 150 only allows the OS to proceed with processing the network event after the context engine 110 has collected all of the needed attributes for this event (e.g., after receiving a message from the context engine that specifies that it has received all of the process or network attributes that it needs for the new network event).

In some embodiments, the context engine 110 uses the process hash that it receives from the GI agent 150 to identify the name and version of the application (i.e., the software product) to which the process belongs. To do this, the context engine 110 in some embodiments stores process hashes and associated application names/versions, compares the process hash that it receives from the GI agent with the stored process hashes to identify a matching hash, and then uses the application name/version of the matching hash as the application name and version of the process associated with the event.

In some embodiments, the context engine 110 obtains the process hashes and application names/versions from one or more network or compute managers that may operate on another device or computer. In other embodiments, the context engine provides the hash associated with a process identifier to a network or compute manager, which then matches this hash to its process hash records and provides the application name/version of the associated process to the context engine. Once the context engine obtains the application name/version associated with a network event, it can provide the name and version attributes to the attribute-based service engines, which can use this information (i.e., the application name and/or version) to identify the service rule to enforce.

Upon the occurrence of a process event on a DCN 105, the DCN's GI agent 150 in some embodiments receives a callback from the DCN's OS and based on this callback, provides a process event identifier to the context engine 110. The process event identifier provides a set of attributes pertaining to the process event. This set of attributes includes the process identifier in some embodiments. In some embodiments, this set also includes a user identifier and a group identifier (e.g., an activity directory (AD) identifier).

In some embodiments, the GI agent provides all the process parameters (e.g., process identifier, user ID, group ID, process name, process hash, loaded module identifiers, consumption parameters, etc.) associated with a process event to the context engine when it reports the process event to the context engine. In other embodiments, the context engine directs the GI agent to collect from the OS modules additional process parameters that are associated with the process identifier that the context engine received with the process event. These additional process parameters in some embodiments are the same (e.g., process name, process hash, loaded module identifiers, consumption parameters, etc.) as the process parameters mentioned above for reported network events.

The context engine 110 of some embodiments augments the contextual attributes that it receives from the GI agents 150 with contextual attributes that it receives from other modules that execute on the host. The DPI module 135 (also referred to as the deep packet inspector) and the threat detector 132 (also referred to as the threat inspection module) are two such modules that provide contextual attributes to augment those that the context engine collects from the GI agents 150. In some embodiments, a DPI module is directed by the context engine 110 or another module (e.g., a firewall engine 128) to examine data messages of a data message flow associated with a process ID to identify the type of traffic being sent in these data messages by the application associated with the process ID.

The identified traffic-type identity is commonly referred to today as the AppID. Also, currently there are a number of DPI modules that analyze messages of a data message flow to generate the AppID for the data message flow. In some embodiments, the context engine combines the AppID that it obtains for a network event with other context attributes that it identifies for this event, in order to produce a very rich set of attributes that the service engines can then use to perform their services. This rich set of attributes provides true application identity (i.e., the application name, application version, application traffic type, etc.), based on which the service engines can perform their services. In some embodiments, the context engine 110 uses a network event's five-tuple identifier to associate the AppID for this event's data message flow with the contextual attributes that the context engine collects from the GI agent of the DCN associated with the data message flow (e.g., of the DCN from which the data message flow emanates).

The threat detector 132 provides a threat level indicator that specifies the threat level associated with a particular application that is executing on a DCN. Once the context engine obtains a set of process parameters that specify that a process has started on a machine or is sending data messages on the machine, the context engine in some embodiments provides one or more process parameters (e.g., process hash, application name, application version, AppID, other process parameters, etc.) to the threat detection module.

The threat detection module then generates a threat level indicator (e.g., low, medium, high, etc.) for the identified process and provides this threat level indicator to the context engine. In some embodiments, the threat detector assigns a threat score to an application running on a DCN based on various application behavioral factors, such as (1) whether it performs poor input validation, (2) whether it passes authentication credentials over unencrypted network links, (3) whether it utilizes weak password and account policies, (4) whether it stores configuration secrets in clear text, (5) whether it can transfer files, (6) whether the application is known to propagate malware, (7) whether the application is purposely evasive, (8) whether the application has known vulnerabilities, etc. In some embodiments, the threat detector is a third-party whitelisting application, such as the Bit9.

The context engine in some embodiments provides the threat level indicator produced by the threat detector 132 to one or more service engines as an additional contextual attribute for performing services on a new process event or the data messages of a new network event. A service engine can use the threat level indicator as another attribute to identify service rules to enforce.

The context engine 110 stores the contextual attributes that it collects for network events and process events in the attribute storage 145. In some embodiments, the context engine stores each set of contextual attributes with one or more network event identifiers and/or process identifiers. For example, in some embodiments, the context engine 110 stores the collected contextual attributes for a new process event with the process identifier, or with a reference to this identifier. The context engine then uses the process identifier to provide the collected context attributes to a service engine (e.g., the process control engine 122) that performs a service for the process event.

The context engine in some embodiments stores the collected context attributes for a new network connection event with the five-tuple identifier of the network connection event, or with a reference to this five-tuple identifier. In some of these embodiments, the context engine provides to a service engine the context attributes for a network event along with this event's five-tuple identifier. The data messages for this network event will use this five-tuple identifier, and hence the service engine can use the supplied five-tuple identifier to identify the context attributes associated with a data message flow.

The context engine employs a push model in some embodiments to distribute the collected contextual attributes to the service engines 130, employs a pull model in other embodiments to distribute these attribute to the service engines 130, while in other embodiments, employing a push model for some service engines and a pull model for other service engines. In the push model, the context engine in some embodiments distributes to a service engine the contextual attributes that it collects for a process event or a network event with the process's identifier and/or the network event's flow identifier (e.g., the flow's five-tuple identifier).

In some embodiments, the context engine distributes to the service engine only the contextual attributes that are relevant for that service engine's service rules. In other words, in these embodiments, the context engine compares each collected attribute in a set of collected attributes (e.g., for a network event or a process event) with a list of attributes used by a service engine's service rules, and discards each collected attribute that is not used by the service rules. The context engine then provides to the service engine only the subset of collected attributes (in the set of collected attributes) that is being used by the engine's service rules. In other embodiments, the service engines perform this filtering operation to discard the contextual attributes that are not needed.

In the pull model, the context engine receives queries from a service engine for the contextual attributes that the context engine has collected for a particular process or network connection. In some embodiments, the context engine receives a process ID or a flow identifier (e.g., five-tuple identifier) with a query from the service engine, and uses the received identifier to identify the attribute set that it will need to provide to the service engine.

In some embodiments, the context engine generates a service token (also called a service tag) for the collection of attributes that are relevant for the service engine, and provides this service token to another module (e.g., the GI agent or another module on the host) to pass along to the service engine (e.g., pass along in a data message's encapsulating tunnel header). The service engine then extracts the service token and provides this service token to the context engine in order to identify the contextual attributes that the context engine will need to provide to the service engine.

In some embodiments, the context engine 110 and the service engines 130 are all kernel space components of a hypervisor on which multiple VMs or containers execute, as further described below by reference to FIG. 2. In other embodiments, the context engine and/or one or more service engines are user space processes. For example, one or more service engines in some embodiments are service VMs (SVMs). In some embodiments, one or more service engines are in ingress datapaths and/or egress datapaths of DCNs, in order to receive access to data message flows to and from the DCNs to perform services on these data message flows. In other embodiments, one or more other modules on the host 100 intercept data messages from the ingress/egress datapaths and forward these messages to one or more service engines for these engines to perform services on the data messages. One such approach will be described below by reference to FIG. 2.

Different embodiments use different types of context-based service engines. In the example illustrated in FIG. 1, the service engines 130 include the discovery engine 120, the process control engine 122, the load balancer 126 and the firewall engine 128. Each of these service engines 130 has an attribute-based, service-rule storage 140. FIG. 1 collectively represents all the context-based, service-rule storages of these service engines with the context-based, service rule storage-140 in order to simplify the illustration that is presented in this figure.

In some embodiments, each service rule in the service-rule storage 140 has a rule identifier for matching to a process or flow identifier to identify the rule to enforce for a process or network event. In some embodiments, the service rule storage 140 is defined in a hierarchical manner to ensure that a rule check will match a higher priority rule before matching a lower priority rule. Also, in some embodiments, the service rule storage 140 contains a default rule that specifies a default action for any rule check, as further explained below.

The firewall engine 128 performs firewall operations on data messages sent by or received for the DCNs 105. These firewall operations are based on firewall rules in the rule storage 140. Some of the firewall rules are defined purely in terms of layer 2-layer 4 attributes, e.g., in terms of five-tuple identifiers. Other firewall rules are defined in terms of contextual attributes that can include one or more of the collected contextual attributes, such as application names, application versions, AppID, resource consumption, threat level, user ID, group ID, etc. Yet other firewall rules in some embodiments are defined in terms of both L2-L4 parameters and contextual attributes. As the firewall engine 128 can resolve firewall rules that are defined by reference to contextual attributes, this firewall engine is referred to as a context-based firewall engine.

In some embodiments, the context-based firewall engine 128 can allow, block or re-route data message flows based on any number of contextual attributes, because its firewall rules can be identified in terms of any combination of the collected contextual attributes. For example, this firewall engine can block all email traffic from chrome.exe when the user is part of a Nurse user group, and one firewall rule specifies that data messages should be blocked when the flow is associated with the Nurse group ID, the AppID identifies the traffic type as email, and the application name is Chrome. Similarly, context-based firewall rules can block data message flows associated with video conferences, online video viewing, or use of older versions of software. Examples of such rules would block all Skype traffic, block all YouTube video traffic, block all HipChat audio/video conferences when the application version number is older than a particular version number, block data message flows for any application with a high threat score, etc.

The load balancing engine 126 performs load balancing operations on data messages sent by the DCNs 105 to distribute the data message flows to different destination or service nodes in one or more destination/service node clusters. These load balancing operations are based on load balancing rules in the rule storage 140. In some of these embodiments, each load balancing rule can specify one or more load balancing criteria (e.g. a round robin criterion, a weighted round-robin criteria, etc.) for distributing traffic and each criteria can be limited to a particular time range. In some embodiments, a load balancing operation involves replacing a data message flow's destination network address (e.g., the destination IP address, the destination MAC address, etc.) with another destination network address.

Some of the load balancing rules are defined purely in terms of L2-L4 attributes, e.g., in terms of five-tuple identifiers. Other load balancing rules are defined in terms of contextual attributes that can include one or more of the collected contextual attributes, such as application names, application versions, AppID, resource consumption, threat level, user ID, group ID, etc. Yet other load balancing rules in some embodiments are defined in terms of both L2-L4 parameters and contextual attributes. As the load balancing engine 126 can resolve load balancing rules that are defined by reference to contextual attributes, this load balancing engine is referred to as a context-based load balancer.

In some embodiments, the context-based load balancer 126 can distribute the data message flows based on any number of contextual attributes, because its load balancing rules can be identified in terms of any combination of the collected contextual attributes. For example, the data distribution of the load balancer 126 can be based on any combination of user and application data. Examples of such load balancing operations include: (1) distributing data message flows associated with the Finance department on all load balancing pools, (2) redirecting all the Finance department's traffic to another pool when the primary pool for this department is down to make this department's traffic highly available, and (3) making all traffic associated with the Doctor's user group highly available. In some embodiments, the load-balancing rules can also be defined in terms of collected resource consumption, in order to distribute traffic to provide more or less resources to applications that consume a lot of resources on the DCNs.

The process control engine 122 enforces context-based process control operations (e.g., process assessment and termination operations) on processes started on the DCNs 105. In some embodiments, whenever the context engine 110 receives a new process event from a GI agent 150 of a DCN, it provides the process parameters associated with this process event to the process control engine 122. This engine then uses the received set of process parameters to examine its service rule storage 140 to identify a matching context-based, process-control rule.

The process control engine 122 can direct the context engine to direct the GI agent of the DCN to perform a process-control operation on a process. Examples of such process-control operations include (1) terminating a video conference application that has a particular version number, (2) terminating a browser that is displaying YouTube traffic, and (3) terminating applications that have a high threat level score.

The discovery engine 120 is another context-based service engine. In some embodiments, the discovery engine 120 captures new process events and new network events from the context engine, along with the contextual attributes that the context engine collects for these process and network events. As further described below, the discovery service engine then relays these events and their associated contextual attributes to one or more network managers (e.g., servers) that provide a management layer that allows network administrators to visualize events in a datacenter and specify policies for compute and network resources in the datacenter.

In relaying these events and attributes to the network management layer, the discovery module of some embodiments performs some pre-processing of these events and attributes. For example, in some embodiments, the discovery module filters some of the network or process events, while aggregating some or all of these events and their attributes. Also, in some embodiments, the discovery engine 120 directs the context engine 110 to collect additional contextual attributes for process or network events through the GI agents 150 or other modules (e.g., the DPI engine or threat detection engine) or to capture other types of events, such as file events and system events.

For example, in some embodiments, the discovery engine directs the context engine to build an inventory of the applications installed on the machines, and to periodically refresh this inventory. The discovery engine might so direct the context engine at the request of the management plane, or based on operational configurations that the management or control plane specifies for the discovery engine. In response to the request from the discovery engine, the context engine in some embodiments has each GI agent on each of its host's machines discover all installed processes on the machine and all running processes and services.

After building an inventory of installed applications and the running processes/services, the discovery engine of a host computer in a datacenter provides this information to the network/compute managers in the management plane. In some embodiments, the management plane collects contextual attributes from sources other than the host computer discovery and context engines. For instance, in some embodiments, the management plane collects from one or more servers compute context (e.g., cloud context from cloud vendors, or compute virtualization context by datacenter virtualization software), identity context from directory service servers, mobility context from mobility management servers, endpoint context from DNS (domain name servers) and application inventory servers, network context (e.g., virtual network context from network virtualization server), etc.

By collecting the contextual information (e.g., information from the discovery and context engines and/or information from other context sources), the management plane can provide a user interface to the network/compute administrators to visualize the compute and network resources in the datacenter. Moreover, the collected contextual attributes allow the management plane to provide controls through this user interface for these administrators to specify context-based service rules and/or policies. These service rules/policies are then distributed to the host computers so that service engines on these computers can perform context-based service operations.

In some embodiments described above, the same service engine 130 (e.g., the same firewall engine 128) performs the same type of service (e.g., a firewall service) based on service rules that can be defined in terms of message flow identifiers (e.g., five-tuple identifiers) or in terms of collected contextual attributes (e.g., AppID, threat level, user identifier, group identifier, application name/version, etc.) associated with the data message flows. In other embodiments, however, different service engines provide the same type of service based on the message flow identifiers (e.g., five-tuple identifiers) and based on the collected contextual attributes of the data message flows. For instance, some embodiments use one flow-based firewall engine that performs firewall operations based on rules defined in terms of flow identifiers, and another context-based firewall engine that performs firewall operations based on rules defined in terms of context attributes (e.g., AppID, threat level, user identifier, group identifier, application name/version, etc.).

FIG. 2 illustrates a more-detailed example of a host computer 200 that in some embodiments is used to establish a distributed architecture for configuring and performing context-rich, attribute-based services in a datacenter. This host computer 200 includes many of the same components as host computer 100, such as context engine 110, service engines 130, threat detector 132, DPI module 135, attribute-based service rule storage 140, and context-attribute storage 145. Like in FIG. 1, the service engines 130 in FIG. 2 include the discovery engine 120, the process control engine 122, the load balancer 126 and the firewall engine 128.

In FIG. 2, the DCNs are VMs 205 that execute on a hypervisor. Also, in FIG. 2, the host computer 200 includes a software forwarding element 210, an attribute-mapping storage 223, a connection state data storages 225, a multiplexer (MUX) 227, and a context-engine policy storage 143. In some embodiments, the context engine 110, the software forwarding element 210, the service engines 130, the rule storages 140, the connection state data storage 225, the context-engine policy storage 143, and the MUX 227 are in the kernel space of the hypervisor, while the VMs 205 are in the hypervisor's user space. In other embodiments, one or more service engines are user space modules (e.g., are service VMs).

In some embodiments, the VMs 205 serve as data end points in the datacenter. Examples of such machines include webservers, application servers, database servers, etc. In some cases, all the VMs belong to one entity, e.g., an enterprise that operates the host. In other cases, the host 200 operate in a multi-tenant environment (e.g., in a multi-tenant data center), and different VMs 205 may belong to one tenant or to multiple tenants.

Each VM 205 includes a GI agent 250 that interacts with the context engine 110 to provide context attribute sets to this engine, and to receive instructions and queries from this engine. The interactions between the GI agents 250 and the context engine 110 are similar to the interactions described above between the GI agents 150 and the context engine 110. However, as shown in FIG. 2, all the communication between the context engine 110 and the GI agents 250 in some embodiments is relayed through the MUX 227. One example of such a MUX is the MUX that is used by the Endpoint Security (EPSec) platform of ESX hypervisors of VMware, Inc.

In some embodiments, the GI agents communicate with the MUX 227 through a fast communication channel (such as VMCI channel of ESX). In some embodiments, this communication channel is a shared memory channel. As mentioned above, the attributes collected by the context engine 110 from the GI agents 250 in some embodiments include a rich group of parameters (e.g., layer 7 parameters, process identifiers, user identifiers, group identifiers, process name, process hash, loaded module identifiers, consumption parameters, etc.).

As shown, each VM 205 also includes a virtual network interface card (VNIC) 255 in some embodiments. Each VNIC is responsible for exchanging messages between its VM and the software forwarding element (SFE) 210. Each VNIC connects to a particular port 260 of the SFE 210. The SFE 210 also connects to a physical network interface card (PNIC) (not shown) of the host. In some embodiments, the VNICs are software abstractions created by the hypervisor of one or more physical NICs (PNICs) of the host.

In some embodiments, the SFE 210 maintains a single port 260 for each VNIC of each VM. The SFE 210 connects to the host PNIC (through a NIC driver (not shown)) to send outgoing messages and to receive incoming messages. In some embodiments, the SFE 210 is defined to include a port 265 that connects to the PNIC's driver to send and receive messages to and from the PNIC. The SFE 210 performs message-processing operations to forward messages that it receives on one of its ports to another one of its ports. For example, in some embodiments, the SFE tries to use data in the message (e.g., data in the message header) to match a message to flow based rules, and upon finding a match, to perform the action specified by the matching rule (e.g., to hand the message to one of its ports 260 or 265, which directs the message to be supplied to a destination VM or to the PNIC).

In some embodiments, the SFE 210 is a software switch, while in other embodiments it is a software router or a combined software switch/router. The SFE 210 in some embodiments implements one or more logical forwarding elements (e.g., logical switches or logical routers) with SFE executing on other hosts in a multi-host environment. A logical forwarding element in some embodiments can span multiple hosts to connect VMs that execute on different hosts but belong to one logical network.

Different logical forwarding elements can be defined to specify different logical networks for different users, and each logical forwarding element can be defined by multiple software forwarding elements on multiple hosts. Each logical forwarding element isolates the traffic of the VMs of one logical network from the VMs of another logical network that is serviced by another logical forwarding element. A logical forwarding element can connect VMs executing on the same host and/or different hosts. In some embodiments, the SFE extracts from a data message a logical network identifier (e.g., a VNI) and a MAC address. The SFE in these embodiments uses the extracted VNI to identify a logical port group, and then uses the MAC address to identify a port within the port group.

Software switches (e.g., software switches of hypervisors) are sometimes referred to as virtual switches because they operate in software, and they provide the VMs with shared access to the PNIC(s) of the host. However, in this document, software switches are referred to as physical switches because they are items in the physical world. This terminology also differentiates software switches from logical switches, which are abstractions of the types of connections that are provided by the software switches. There are various mechanisms for creating logical switches from software switches. VXLAN provides one manner for creating such logical switches. The VXLAN standard is described in Mahalingam, Mallik; Dutt, Dinesh G.; et al. (2013-05-08), VXLAN: A Framework for Overlaying Virtualized Layer 2 Networks over Layer 3 Networks, IETF.

The ports of the SFE 210 in some embodiments include one or more function calls to one or more modules that implement special input/output (I/O) operations on incoming and outgoing messages that are received at the ports. Examples of I/O operations that are implemented by the ports 260 include ARP broadcast suppression operations and DHCP broadcast suppression operations, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 9,548,965. Other I/O operations (such as firewall operations, load balancing operations, network address translation operations, etc.) can be so implemented in some embodiments of the invention. By implementing a stack of such function calls, the ports can implement a chain of I/O operations on incoming and/or outgoing messages in some embodiments. Also, in some embodiments, other modules in the data path (such as the VNICs 255, port 265, etc.) implement the I/O function call operations, instead of, or in conjunction with, the ports 260.

In some embodiments, one or more of function calls of the SFE ports 260 can be to one or more service engines 130 that process context-based service rules in the context-based service rule storages 140. Each service engine 130 in some embodiments has its own context-based service rule storage 140, attribute-mapping storage 223, and connection cache storage 225. FIG. 2 presents just one service rule storage 140, attribute mapping storage 223, and connection cache storage 225 for all of the service engines in order not to obscure the presentation in this figure with unnecessary detail. Also, in some embodiments, each VM has its own instance of each service engine 130 (e.g., its own instance of discovery engine 120, process control engine 122, load balancer 126, and firewall engine 128). In other embodiments, one service engine can service data message flows for multiple VMs on a host (e.g., VMs for the same logical network).

To perform its service operation for a data message flow, a service engine 130 in some embodiments tries to match the flow identifier (e.g., the five-tuple identifier) and/or the flow's associated context attribute set to the rule identifiers of its service rules in its service rule storage 140. Specifically, for a service engine 130 to perform its service check operation for a data message flow, the SFE port 260 that calls the service engine supplies a set of attributes of a message that the port receives. In some embodiments, the set of attributes are message identifiers, such as traditional five-tuple identifiers. In some embodiments, one or more of the identifier values can be logical values that are defined for a logical network (e.g., can be IP addresses defined in a logical address space). In other embodiments, all of the identifier values are defined in the physical domains. In still other embodiments, some of the identifier values are defined in the logical domain, while other identifier values are defined in the physical domain.

The service engine in some embodiments then uses the received message's attribute set (e.g., the message's five-tuple identifier) to identify the context attribute set that the service engine has stored for this flow in the attribute-mapping storage 223. As mentioned above, the context engine 110 in some embodiments supplies the context attributes for new flows (i.e., new network connection events) and for new processes to the service engines 130, along with a flow identifier (e.g., a five-tuple identifier) or a process identifier. The context-engine policy storage 143 contains the rules that control the operation of the context engine 110. In some embodiments, these policies direct the context engine to generate rules for the service engines or to direct the service engines to generate rules. The service engines 130 in these embodiments store the context attributes that they receive from the context engine in the attribute-mapping storage 223.

In some embodiments, a service engine 130 stores the context attribute set for each new flow or new process with that flow's identifier (e.g., five-tuple identifier) or that process' identifier in the attribute-mapping storage. In this manner, the service engine can identify the context attribute set for each new flow that it receives from the SFE port 260 by searching its attribute-mapping storage 223 for a context record that has a matching flow identifier. The context record with the matching flow identifier includes the context attribute set for this flow. Similarly, when identifying the context attribute set for a process event, a service engine in some embodiments searches its attribute-mapping storage 223 for a context record with a matching process identifier.

As mentioned above, some or all of the service engines in some embodiments pull the context attribute sets for a new flow or new process from the context engine. For instance, in some embodiments, a service engine supplies a new flow's five-tuple identifier that it receives from the SFE port 260, to the context engine 110. This engine 110 then examines its attribute storage 145 to identify a set of attributes that is stored for this five-tuple identifier, and then supplies this attribute set (or a subset of it that it obtains by filtering the identified attribute set for the service engine) to the service engine.

As described above, some embodiments implement the pull model by using a service token to encode the attribute set for a new message flow. When notified of a new network connection event, the context engine 110 in some embodiments (1) collects the context attribute set for the new event, (2) filters this set to discard the attributes that are not relevant for performing one or more services on the flow, (3) stores the remaining filtered attribute subset in the attribute storage 145 along with a service token, and (4) provides the service token to the GI agent 250. The GI agent then passes or has another module pass this token to be passed to the service engine(s) in-band (e.g., in a tunnel header of a data message that the agent's VM sends to a destination) or out-of-band (i.e., separately from the data messages that the agent's VM sends to a destination).

When the service engine gets the new flow through the SFE port 260, it supplies this flow's service token to the context engine, which uses this service token to identify in its context-attribute storage 145 the context attributes to supply to the service engine. In the embodiments where the SFE port does not provide this service token to the service engine, the service engine first has to identify the service token by searching its data stores using the flow's identifier before supplying the service token to the context engine.

After identifying the contextual attribute set for a data message flow, the service engine 130 in some embodiments performs its service operation based on service rules that are stored in the service rule storage 140. To perform its service operation, the service engine 130 matches the received attribute subset with corresponding attribute sets that are stored for the service rules. In some embodiments, each service rule in the rule storage 140 has a rule identifier and an action parameter set. As mentioned above, the rule identifier of a service rule in some embodiments can be defined in terms of one or more contextual attributes that are not L2-L4 header parameters (e.g., are L7 parameters, process identifiers, user identifiers, group identifiers, process name, process hash, loaded module identifiers, consumption parameters, etc.). In some embodiments, a rule identifier can also include L2-L4 header parameters. Also, in some embodiments, one or more parameters in a rule identifier can be specified in terms of an individual value or a wildcard value. Also, in some embodiments, a rule identifier can include a set of individual values or a group identifier such as a security group identifier, a compute construct identifier, a network construct identifier, etc.

To match a received attribute set with the rules, the service engine compares the received attribute set with the associated identifiers of the service rules stored in the service rule storage 140. Upon identifying a matching rule, the service engine 130 performs a service operation (e.g., a firewall operation, a load balancing operation, other middlebox operation, etc.), based on the action parameter (e.g., based on Allow/Drop parameters, the load balancing criteria, etc.) of the matching rule

In some embodiments, the service rule storage 140 is defined in a hierarchical manner to ensure that a message rule check will match a higher priority rule before matching a lower priority rule, when the message's attribute subset matches multiple rules. Also, in some embodiments, the service rule storage 140 contains a default rule that specifies a default action for any message rule check that cannot identify any other service rules; this default rule will be a match for all possible attribute subsets in some embodiments, and ensures that the service rule engine will return an action for all received attribute subsets. In some embodiments, the default rule will specify that no service is needed.

Multiple messages can have the same message identifier attribute sets, e.g., when the messages are part of one flow that is associated with one communication session between two machines. Accordingly, after matching a data message with a service rule in the context-based service rule storage 140 based on the message's identified context-attribute set, the service engine of some embodiments stores the service rule (or a reference to the service rule) in the connection state data storage 225, so that it can later use this service rule for subsequent data messages of the same flow.

In some embodiments, the connection state data storage 225 stores the service rule, or a reference to the service rule, that the service engine 130 identifies for different message identifier sets (e.g., for different five-tuple identifiers that identify different data message flows). In some embodiments, the connection state data storage 225 stores each service rule, or reference to the service rule, with an identifier (e.g., a flow's five-tuple identifier and/or a hash value of the flow's five-tuple identifier) that is generated from the matching message identifier set.

Before checking with the service rule storage 140 for a particular message, the service rule engine 130 of some embodiments checks the connection state data storage 225 to determine whether this storage has previously identified a service rule for this message's flow. If not, the service engine 130 identifies the contextual attribute set for the message flow, and then checks the service rule storage 140 for a service rule that matches the message's identified attribute set and/or its five-tuple identifier. When the connection state data storage 225 has an entry for the particular message, the service engine performs its service operation based on this service rule's action parameter set.

In the service architecture of FIG. 2, the DPI module 135 performs deep packet inspection on a data message flow at the direction of the firewall engine 128. Specifically, when the firewall engine 128 receives a new data message that is part of a new data message flow, the firewall engine in some embodiments directs the DPI module to inspect that new data message and one or more of the next few data messages in the same flow. Based on this examination, the DPI engine identifies the type of traffic (i.e., the application on the wire) that is being sent in this data message flow, generates an AppID for this traffic type, and stores this AppID in the attribute storage 145. In some embodiments, the context attribute sets are stored in the attribute storage based on flow identifiers and/or process identifier. Accordingly, in some embodiments, the DPI engine 135 stores the AppID for a new data message flow in the attribute storage 145 based on that flow's five-tuple identifier.

In some embodiments, the context engine 110 pushes to the service engines 130 the AppID for a new data message flow once the DPI engine stores the AppID in the attribute storage 145. In other embodiments, the context engine 110 pulls the AppID from the storage 145 whenever it is queried for the contextual attributes for a data message flow by a service engine. In some embodiments, the context engine 110 uses the five-tuple identifier of the flow to identify the record in the attribute storage 145 with the matching record identifier and the AppID.

FIG. 3 illustrates a process 300 that the context engine performs 110 in some embodiments each time it is notified about a new process or network connection event. From a GI agent 250 of a VM 205, the process 300 initially receives (at 305) a notification regarding a new process or network connection event. Next, at 310, the process 300 collects all of the desired contextual attributes regarding the reported event.

As described above, the context engine 110 in some embodiments interacts (at 310) with the reporting GI agent 250 to collect additional information regarding a reported event. The GI agent in some embodiments interacts with the network stack and/or process subsystem in the VM's OS kernel space to collect contextual attributes regarding a process or network event. The GI agent in some embodiments also collects this information from user-space modules (e.g., a user mode dynamic link library, DLL) that operate in user-space processes (e.g., a VMtool.exe) to collect contextual attributes. On VM's using Microsoft Windows, the GI agent in some embodiments registers hooks in the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) to obtain network events, while also registering in the Window's process subsystem to collect process related attributes. In some embodiments, the GI agent hook is at the Application Layer Enforcement (ALE) layer of the WFP, so that it can capture all socket-connection requests from application processes on the VM.

In some embodiments, the context engine 110 interacts with the management or control plane to collect contextual attributes and/or to receive records that it can examine to identify contextual attributes for identified network or process events. In some of these embodiments, the context engine interacts with a management or control plane proxy (that operates on its host) in order to obtain data from the management or control plane servers that operate outside of the host. In some of these embodiments, the context engine operates in the kernel space.

After collecting the contextual attributes at 310, the process uses (at 315) the attributes of the received event or the contextual attributes collected for the received event to identify one or more policies in the context-engine policy storage 143. At 315, the process identifies any policy that has a policy identifier that matches the collected attributes and event attributes. Next, at 320, the process produces context-attribute mapping records for one or more service engines based on the policies identified at 315. One or more of the identified policies might specify that for a particular process or network event, a particular set of service engines need to be notified about the event (e.g., about a new data message flow), with each service engine receiving a subset of contextual attributes that are relevant for that service engine to perform its processing for that event. This operation in some embodiments involves the context engine withholding attributes that are not relevant for each particular service engine in the subset of contextual attributes that it provides to that particular service engine.

In some embodiments, certain events might necessitate new service rules to be created for one or more service engines. In some such embodiments, the context-engine policy storage 143 includes policies that direct the context engine to generate service rules for service engines under certain circumstances, or to direct the service engines to generate such service rules. For such embodiments, the process (at 320), if needed, generates service rules for service engines under certain circumstances or directs the service engines to generate such service rules

At 325, the process 300 distributes the mapping records and/or generated service rules/instructions to one or more service engines. As mentioned above, the context engine can employ a push model or a pull model to distribute such records and/or rules/instructions. When employing a pull model, the process 300 in some embodiments not only performs the operation 325 in response to a query from a service engine, but also performs some or all of the operation 320 in response to this query. After 325, the process ends.

The load balancing engine 126 is a context-based load balancer that performs its load balancing operations based on load balancing rules that can be specified in terms of not only L2-L4 parameters, but also in terms of contextual attributes. FIG. 4 illustrates an example of such context-based load balancing rules, while FIG. 5 shows the load balancers that use these rules in some embodiments. These rules are used independently by different load balancing engines 126 on different hosts 500 to distribute data messages from different webserver VMs 505 on these hosts to different application server VMs 510, as shown in FIG. 5. In some embodiments, the hosts 500 are similar to the host 200, and the webserver VMs 505 and the application server VMs 510 are similar to the VMs 205 of FIG. 2. To avoid obscuring the figure with unnecessary detail, the only components of hosts 500 that are shown in FIG. 5 are the load balancers 126 and the webserver VMs 505, with the load balancers appearing as service modules in the egress path of the webservers VMs 505.

In the example illustrated in FIG. 5, the load balancers 126 collectively form a distributed load balancer (i.e., a single, conceptual logical load balancer) that spans across the multiple hosts to distribute webserver VM traffic uniformly across the application server VMs. As further described below, the load balancing criteria of the load balancing rules for the different load balancers 126 in some embodiments is the same to ensure uniform treatment of the webserver VM traffic. As shown by host 500 b, multiple webserver VMs 505 can execute on the same host 500, with each of these webserver VMs being serviced by a different load balancer 126. In other embodiments, one load balancer can service multiple VMs on the same host (e.g., multiple VMs for the same tenant on the same host). Also, in some embodiments, multiple application server VMs can execute on the same host with each other and/or with the webserver VMs.

In the examples illustrated in FIGS. 4-5, the load balancers 126 perform a destination network address translation (DNAT) that transforms a virtual IP (VIP) address for the application servers to a specific application VM's IP address, called a destination IP address or a DIP. In other embodiments, the DNAT operation can translate other network addresses, e.g., it can translate the MAC address to effectuate a MAC-redirect. Also, even though the load balancers in FIGS. 4-5 distribute webserver traffic among the application servers of an application server group (cluster), the load balancers can be used to distribute traffic from any set of one or more service or compute nodes among the service or compute nodes of any service/compute node cluster.

FIG. 4 illustrates a load-balancing (LB) rule storage 140 that stores several LB rules, with each LB rule associated with one load-balanced compute or service cluster. Each load balance rule includes (1) a rule identifier 405, (2) several IP addresses 410 of several nodes of the load-balanced node group, and (3) a weight value 415 for each IP address. Each rule identifier 405 specifies one or more data tuples that can be used to identify a rule that matches a data message flow.

In some embodiments, a rule identifier can include a VIP address (such as the VIP address of the application server group in FIG. 5) of the rule's associated DCN group. As shown, the rule identifier can include in some embodiments any L2-L4 parameters (e.g., source IP address, source port, destination port, protocol, etc.). Also, as shown, the rule identifier for a LB rule can include contextual attributes, such as AppID, application name, application version, user ID, group ID, threat level, resource consumption, etc. In some embodiments, a load balancer searches a LB data storage by comparing one or more message attributes (e.g., five-tuple header values, contextual attributes) with the rule identifiers 405 to identify the highest priority rule with a matching rule identifier.

Each LB rule's IP addresses 410 are the IP addresses of the compute or service node that are members of the load-balanced compute or service group that is associated with the rule (e.g., of the load-balanced group that is associated with a VIP address specified in the rule's identifier 405). As further described below, the addresses of these nodes are supplied in some embodiments by a controller set that configures the load balancers. In some embodiments, the load balancer translates the destination IP address of a received data message to one of the IP addresses 410 (e.g., translates a VIP contained in the data message to a DIP).

In some embodiments, a load balancer performs its load balancing operation based on one or more load balancing criteria. The LB rules of some embodiments contain such LB criteria, in order to specify within each rule how the load balancer should spread the traffic across the nodes of a load-balanced group when a message flow matches that rule. In the example illustrated in FIG. 4, the load-balancing criteria is a weighted round robin scheme that is defined by the weight values 415 of each rule. Specifically, the weight values 415 for each IP address of each LB rule provides the criteria for a load balancer to spread the traffic to the nodes of a LB node group.

For instance, the application server group of FIG. 5 has five application servers. Assume that the load-balancing rule for distributing the webserver traffic amongst these five application servers specifies the weight values of 1, 3, 1, 3, and 2 for the five IP addresses of the five application servers. Based on these values, a load balancer would distribute data messages that are part of ten new flows in the following order: first flow to the first IP address, second to fourth flow to the second IP address, fifth flow to the third IP address, sixth to eighth flow to the fourth IP address, and ninth and tenth flow to the fifth IP address. According to this scheme, the assignment of the next batch of new flows loops back through these IP addresses (e.g., the eleventh flow would be assigned to the first IP address and so on).

In some embodiments, the weight values for an LB rule are generated and adjusted by the controller set based on the LB statistics that the load balancers (1) collect regarding the data message flows that they distribute amongst the nodes of the LB node group(s) and (2) provide to the controller set. Also, to gracefully switch between different load balancing criteria, the LB rules in some embodiments specify time periods for different load balancing criteria of a LB rule that are valid for different periods of time. Accordingly, in some embodiments, a load-balancing rule might specify multiple different sets of destination network addresses with different temporal values that specify when each set of addresses is valid. Each of these sets in some embodiments can include its own set of LB criteria (e.g., its own set of weight values).

FIG. 6 illustrates a process 600 that the load balancer 126 performs in some embodiments. As shown, the process 600 starts when the load balancer receives (at 605) a data message from its corresponding SFE port 260. This port relays this message when it receives the data message from its VM or for its VM. In some embodiments, the port relays the data message by passing to the load balancer a reference (e.g., a handle that identifies a location in memory that stores the data message) to the data message or the data message's header values.

The process determines (at 610) whether the connection state cache 225 stores a record that identifies the destination to which the data message should be forwarded. As mentioned above, each time a load balancer uses a LB rule to direct a new data message flow to a node of a load-balanced node group, the load balancer in some embodiments creates a record in the connection state cache 225 to store the physical IP address of the selected node. When the load balancer receives another data message within the same flow (i.e., with the same five-tuple identifier), it can forward it to the same node that it used for previous data messages in the same flow. The use of the connection state cache 225 allows the load balancer 126 to process the data message flows more quickly. In some embodiments, each cached record in the connection state cache 225 has a record identifier that is defined in terms of data message identifiers (e.g., five-tuple identifiers). In these embodiments, the process compares the received data message's identifier (e.g., five-tuple identifier) with the record identifiers of the cached records to identify any record with a record identifier that matches the received data message's identifier.

When the process 600 identifies (at 610) a record for the received data message's flow in the connection state cache 225, the process (at 615) then replaces the message's destination address (e.g., the VIP address) with the destination address (e.g., the DIP) that is stored in the record in the connection state cache 225. At 615, the process sends the address-translated data message along its datapath. In some embodiments, this operation entails returning a communication to the SFE port 260 (that called the load balancer to initiate the process 600) to indicate that the load balancer is done with its processing of the VM data message. The SFE port 260 can then handoff the data message to the SFE or the VM, or can call another service engine in the I/O chain operator to perform another service operation on the data message. At 615, the process 600 also updates in some embodiments the statistics that it maintains regarding its data message flow processing. After 615, the process 600 ends.

When the process 600 determines (at 610) that the connection cache 225 does not store a record for the received data message's flow, the process 600 identifies (at 620) one or more contextual attributes for this data message flow. As mentioned above, the service engines of different embodiments perform this operation differently. For instance, in some embodiments, the load balancer 126 checks the attribute-mapping storage 223 for a record that has a record identifier that matches the received data message's header values (e.g., its five-tuple identifier). It then uses (at 620) the contextual attribute set of this matching record as the contextual attribute set of the received data message flow.

In other embodiments, the load balancer 126 queries the context engine to obtain the contextual attribute set for the received data message. With this query, the load balancer supplies the received message's flow identifier (e.g., five-tuple identifier) or its associated service token. The context engine then uses the message's flow identifier or its associated service token to identify a set of contextual attributes in its context attribute storage 145, and it then provides the identified set of contextual attributes to the load balancer 126, as explained above.

Once the process 600 has obtained the contextual attribute set for the received data message, it uses this attribute set along with the message's other identifiers to identify (at 625) an LB rule in the load-balancing (LB) rule storage 140 for the data message received at 605. For instance, in some embodiments, the LB rules have rule identifiers 405 that are defined in terms of one or more of the five-tuple attributes along with one or more contextual attributes such as application name, application version, user ID, group ID, AppID, threat level, resource consumption level, etc. To identify the LB rule in the load-balancing (LB) rule storage 140, the process in some embodiments compares the contextual attributes and/or other attributes (e.g., five-tuple identifier) of the received data message with the rule identifiers (e.g., rule identifiers 405) of the LB rules to identify the highest priority rule that has an identifier that matches the message's attribute set.

In some embodiments, the process uses different message attribute sets to perform this comparison operation. For instance, in some embodiments, the message attribute set includes the destination IP address of the message (e.g., the VIP of the addressed node group) along with one or more contextual attributes. In other embodiments, the message attribute set includes other attributes, such as one or more of the other five-tuple identifiers (e.g., one or more of the source IP, source port, destination port, and protocol). In some embodiments, the message attribute set includes logical network identifiers such as a virtual network identifier (VNI), virtual distributed router identifier (VDRI), a logical MAC address, a logical IP address, etc.

As mentioned above, each LB rule in some embodiments includes two or more destination addresses (e.g., IP addresses 410), which are the destination addresses (e.g., IP addresses) of the nodes that are members of the load-balanced node group. When the process identifies an LB rule (at 630), it selects one of the destination addresses (e.g., IP addresses) of the rule to replace the virtual address (e.g., the VIP address) in the message. Also, as mentioned above, each LB rule in some embodiments stores a set of load balancing criteria for facilitating the process' selection of one of the destination addresses of the LB rule to replace the message's virtual destination identifier. In some embodiments, the stored criteria are the weight and/or times values that were described above by reference to FIGS. 4 and 5. Accordingly, in some embodiments, the process 600 selects one of the matching rule's destination addresses based on the selection criteria stored in the rule, and changes the message's destination address to the selected destination address.

After changing the destination address of the data message, the process (at 630) sends the data message along its datapath. Again, in some embodiments, this operation entails returning a communication to the SFE port 260 (that called the load balancer to initiate the process 600) to indicate that the load balancer is done with its processing of the VM data message. The SFE port 260 can then handoff the data message to the SFE or the VM, or can call another service engine in the I/O chain operator to perform another service operation on the data message.

After 630, the process transitions to 635, where in the connection cache data store 225, it creates a record to identify the compute or service node in the load-balanced group (i.e., to identify the node destination identifier) to use to forward data messages that are part of the same flow as the data message received at 605. At 635, the process 600 also updates the statistics that it maintains for the node to which the message was addressed by the process 600. This update reflects the transmission of a new data message to this node. After 635, the process ends.

Because of its use of contextual attributes to define the rule identifiers of the LB rules, the context-based load balancer 126 can distribute the data message flows based on any number of contextual attributes. As mentioned above, examples of such load balancing operations include: (1) distributing data message flows associated with the Finance department on all load balancing pools, (2) redirecting all the Finance department's traffic to another pool when the primary pool for this department is down to make this department's traffic highly available, (3) making all traffic associated with the Doctor's user group highly available, and (4) distributing data message flows for Finance applications amongst the service nodes of a low-latency service node group. In some embodiments, the load-balancing rules can also be defined in terms of collected resource consumption, in order to distribute traffic to provide more or fewer resources to applications that consume a lot of resources on the DCNs.

In some embodiments, the management plane obtains an inventory of all processes and services that are running on the VMs on the hosts in a datacenter. The discovery engine 120 of a host 200 in some embodiments assists in collecting this data from the VMs executing on its host. In some embodiments, the inventoried process/services are referred to as the inventoried applications, which include all client processes, services or daemons that utilize network input/output and all server processes that have registered to listen to (i.e., to obtain messages) certain network connections. The discovery engine collects this data using the GI agents 250 and the MUX 227 in some embodiments.

Based on the data collected by all the discovery engines on all the hosts, the management servers (e.g., the network managers and/or compute managers) build the inventory of the running applications. In some embodiments, each application is identified by comparing its file hash obtained from the VMs 205 with hashes of application files stored in the application data storage of the management plane. The management plane in some embodiments has the discovery engines update their data collection so that the management plane can refresh its inventory on a scheduled basis.

The management plane in some embodiments then provides a rule creation interface for allowing administrators to create context-based LB rules and/or policies for the LB engines 126 (as well as service rules for the other service engines 130). The rule creation interface allows the administrators to define high-level LB policies (and other service policies) based on applications inventoried through the data collected by the discovery engines 120, and contextual attributes collected by the context engines 110 and by the management plane's interface with other management server clusters.

Once the high-level LB policies (and other service policies) are defined in the management plane, the management plane directly supplies some or all of these policies to the management proxies (not shown) on the hosts 200, and/or indirectly supplies some or all of these policies to these proxies through a set of controllers (e.g., network controllers). In some embodiments, the management proxies publish the received policies as rules to the service engine rule storages 140. In some embodiments, the proxies transform these policies before publishing them to the service rule storages 140. For instance, in some embodiments, the policies are published with AppliedTo tuples that identify the service nodes and/or logical networks to which they are associated. In some of these embodiments, the management proxies on the hosts remove the AppliedTo tuple from each service policy, before pushing the policy as a service rule to the service engine 140. Also, as mentioned above, the context engines 110 on the hosts 200 in some embodiments resolve the policies based on collected contextual attributes, in order to generate rules for the service engines.

FIG. 7 illustrates an example of how the service engines 130 are managed in some embodiments. This figure illustrates multiple hosts 200 in a datacenter. As shown, each host includes several service engines 130, a context engine 110, a threat detector 132, a DPI module 135, several VMs 205, and an SFE 210. It also illustrates a set of controllers 710 for managing the service engines 130, VMs 205, and SFEs 210. As mentioned above, the context engines 110 in some embodiments collect contextual attributes that are passed to the management servers in the controller set through a network 750 (e.g., through a local area network, a wide area network, a network of networks (such as the Internet), etc.). The controller set provides a user interface for the administrators to define context-based service rules in terms of these collected contextual attributes, and communicates with the hosts through the network 750 to provide these policies. The hosts are also communicatively connected to each other through this network 750.

Many of the above-described features and applications are implemented as software processes that are specified as a set of instructions recorded on a computer readable storage medium (also referred to as computer readable medium). When these instructions are executed by one or more processing unit(s) (e.g., one or more processors, cores of processors, or other processing units), they cause the processing unit(s) to perform the actions indicated in the instructions. Examples of computer readable media include, but are not limited to, CD-ROMs, flash drives, RAM chips, hard drives, EPROMs, etc. The computer readable media does not include carrier waves and electronic signals passing wirelessly or over wired connections.

In this specification, the term “software” is meant to include firmware residing in read-only memory or applications stored in magnetic storage, which can be read into memory for processing by a processor. Also, in some embodiments, multiple software inventions can be implemented as sub-parts of a larger program while remaining distinct software inventions. In some embodiments, multiple software inventions can also be implemented as separate programs. Finally, any combination of separate programs that together implement a software invention described here is within the scope of the invention. In some embodiments, the software programs, when installed to operate on one or more electronic systems, define one or more specific machine implementations that execute and perform the operations of the software programs.

FIG. 8 conceptually illustrates a computer system 800 with which some embodiments of the invention are implemented. The computer system 800 can be used to implement any of the above-described hosts, controllers, and managers. As such, it can be used to execute any of the above described processes. This computer system includes various types of non-transitory machine readable media and interfaces for various other types of machine readable media. Computer system 800 includes a bus 805, processing unit(s) 810, a system memory 825, a read-only memory 830, a permanent storage device 835, input devices 840, and output devices 845.

The bus 805 collectively represents all system, peripheral, and chipset buses that communicatively connect the numerous internal devices of the computer system 800. For instance, the bus 805 communicatively connects the processing unit(s) 810 with the read-only memory 830, the system memory 825, and the permanent storage device 835.

From these various memory units, the processing unit(s) 810 retrieve instructions to execute and data to process in order to execute the processes of the invention. The processing unit(s) may be a single processor or a multi-core processor in different embodiments. The read-only-memory (ROM) 830 stores static data and instructions that are needed by the processing unit(s) 810 and other modules of the computer system. The permanent storage device 835, on the other hand, is a read-and-write memory device. This device is a non-volatile memory unit that stores instructions and data even when the computer system 800 is off. Some embodiments of the invention use a mass-storage device (such as a magnetic or optical disk and its corresponding disk drive) as the permanent storage device 835.

Other embodiments use a removable storage device (such as a floppy disk, flash drive, etc.) as the permanent storage device. Like the permanent storage device 835, the system memory 825 is a read-and-write memory device. However, unlike storage device 835, the system memory is a volatile read-and-write memory, such a random access memory. The system memory stores some of the instructions and data that the processor needs at runtime. In some embodiments, the invention's processes are stored in the system memory 825, the permanent storage device 835, and/or the read-only memory 830. From these various memory units, the processing unit(s) 810 retrieve instructions to execute and data to process in order to execute the processes of some embodiments.

The bus 805 also connects to the input and output devices 840 and 845. The input devices enable the user to communicate information and select commands to the computer system. The input devices 840 include alphanumeric keyboards and pointing devices (also called “cursor control devices”). The output devices 845 display images generated by the computer system. The output devices include printers and display devices, such as cathode ray tubes (CRT) or liquid crystal displays (LCD). Some embodiments include devices such as a touchscreen that function as both input and output devices.

Finally, as shown in FIG. 8, bus 805 also couples computer system 800 to a network 865 through a network adapter (not shown). In this manner, the computer can be a part of a network of computers (such as a local area network (“LAN”), a wide area network (“WAN”), or an Intranet, or a network of networks, such as the Internet. Any or all components of computer system 800 may be used in conjunction with the invention.

Some embodiments include electronic components, such as microprocessors, storage and memory that store computer program instructions in a machine-readable or computer-readable medium (alternatively referred to as computer-readable storage media, machine-readable media, or machine-readable storage media). Some examples of such computer-readable media include RAM, ROM, read-only compact discs (CD-ROM), recordable compact discs (CD-R), rewritable compact discs (CD-RW), read-only digital versatile discs (e.g., DVD-ROM, dual-layer DVD-ROM), a variety of recordable/rewritable DVDs (e.g., DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, etc.), flash memory (e.g., SD cards, mini-SD cards, micro-SD cards, etc.), magnetic and/or solid state hard drives, read-only and recordable Blu-Ray® discs, ultra density optical discs, any other optical or magnetic media, and floppy disks. The computer-readable media may store a computer program that is executable by at least one processing unit and includes sets of instructions for performing various operations. Examples of computer programs or computer code include machine code, such as is produced by a compiler, and files including higher-level code that are executed by a computer, an electronic component, or a microprocessor using an interpreter.

While the above discussion primarily refers to microprocessor or multi-core processors that execute software, some embodiments are performed by one or more integrated circuits, such as application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In some embodiments, such integrated circuits execute instructions that are stored on the circuit itself.

As used in this specification, the terms “computer”, “server”, “processor”, and “memory” all refer to electronic or other technological devices. These terms exclude people or groups of people. For the purposes of the specification, the terms display or displaying means displaying on an electronic device. As used in this specification, the terms “computer readable medium,” “computer readable media,” and “machine readable medium” are entirely restricted to tangible, physical objects that store information in a form that is readable by a computer. These terms exclude any wireless signals, wired download signals, and any other ephemeral or transitory signals.

While the invention has been described with reference to numerous specific details, one of ordinary skill in the art will recognize that the invention can be embodied in other specific forms without departing from the spirit of the invention. For instance, several figures conceptually illustrate processes. The specific operations of these processes may not be performed in the exact order shown and described. The specific operations may not be performed in one continuous series of operations, and different specific operations may be performed in different embodiments. Furthermore, the process could be implemented using several sub-processes, or as part of a larger macro process. Thus, one of ordinary skill in the art would understand that the invention is not to be limited by the foregoing illustrative details, but rather is to be defined by the appended claims. 

The invention claimed is:
 1. A method for load balancing data messages sent by a first machine executing on a host computer with a plurality of other machines, the method comprising: at a load-balancing module executing on the host computer, receiving a data message sent by the first machine; using a first set of attributes of the data message to identify a second set of one or more attributes associated with the first machine, the second set of attributes including at least one contextual attribute that is not a layer 2, layer 3 or layer 4 data-message header value; using the identified second set of attributes to identify a load-balancing rule; and based on the identified load-balancing rule, performing a load balancing operation that includes a network address translation operation to forward the data message to a node in a load-balanced group of nodes.
 2. The method of claim 1, wherein the identified second set of attributes includes an application identifier that identifies a traffic type for a payload data contained within a data message flow of the data message.
 3. The method of claim 1, wherein the identified second set of attributes includes an identifier of a user logged on to the first machine.
 4. The method of claim 3, wherein the user identifier is a group identifier.
 5. The method of claim 3, wherein the user identifier is an identifier that identifies a single individual.
 6. The method of claim 1, wherein the second identified set of attributes includes a threat level associated with an application that executes on the first machine.
 7. The method of claim 6, wherein the application is the application that sent the data message.
 8. The method of claim 6, wherein the application is not the application that sent the data message.
 9. The method of claim 1, wherein the second identified set of attributes includes a resource consumed on the first machine by a process that sent the data message, wherein the resource is memory or processor.
 10. The method of claim 1, wherein the second identified set of attributes includes a network resource consumed on the first machine by a process that sent the data message.
 11. A non-transitory machine readable medium storing a program for load balancing data messages sent by a first machine executing on a host computer with a plurality of other machines, the program comprising sets of instructions for: receiving a data message sent by the first machine; identifying, for the data message, a set of one or more attributes that are received separately from the data message as part of another communication from the first machine, the set of attributes including at least one contextual attribute other than layer 2, layer 3 and layer 4 data-message header values; using the identified set of attributes to identify a load-balancing rule; and based on the identified load-balancing rule, performing a load balancing operation that includes a network address translation operation to forward the data message to a node in a load-balanced group of nodes.
 12. The non-transitory machine readable medium of claim 11, wherein the identified set of attributes includes an application identifier that identifies a traffic type for a payload data contained within a data message flow of the data message.
 13. The non-transitory machine readable medium of claim 11, wherein the identified set of attributes includes an identifier of a user logged on to the first machine.
 14. The method of claim 1 further comprising receiving the second set of attributes from the first machine in a communication that is separate from the received data message.
 15. The method of claim 1, wherein the first set of attributes comprises a set of header values of the received data message.
 16. A computer comprising: a set of processing units for executing instructions; a plurality of machine for execution by the set of processing units; and a non-transitory machine readable medium storing a program for load balancing data messages sent by a first machine of the plurality of machines, the program comprising sets of instructions for: receiving a data message sent by the first machine; identifying, for the data message, a set of one or more attributes that are received separately from the data message as part of another communication from the first machine, the set of attributes including at least one contextual attribute other than layer 2, layer 3 and layer 4 data-message header values; using the identified set of attributes to identify a load-balancing rule; and based on the identified load-balancing rule, performing a load balancing operation that includes a network address translation operation to forward the data message to a node in a load-balanced group of nodes.
 17. The computer of claim 16, wherein the identified set of attributes includes an application identifier that identifies a traffic type for a payload data contained within a data message flow of the data message.
 18. The computer of claim 16, wherein the identified set of attributes includes an identifier of a user logged on to the first machine. 